Two New Tables

Phil has built two tables in the last two days, with help from his oldest two sons.

On Monday after our hike, he went out to his new work area in the little greenhouse and built himself a workbench. We had a workbench in our home in Boulder and he has missed that for the last two years. He has bolted down his clamp and his grinder and is thrilled to have a workspace again.

I was impressed he got it done, start to finish, in a single afternoon.

And, when the sunlight overheated the greenhouse, he took a tarp and covered the plastic, blocking the rays and keeping him comfortable.

On Tuesday, he began work on a more ambitious project, a butcher table. We had a kitchen-sized butcher block in Boulder, brought over from Germany when he was a boy (and still in storage, waiting for us to be in a larger dwelling). But somehow I'd never thought much about what a butcher block actually meant.

Phil had researched it. First, you take board and line them up on end.

Trim the tops and bottoms, so the boards are more or less the same size, with the heartwood intact.

Drill holes through each board in about five places, and then pound wooden dowels through the board. Not surprisingly, this takes a good bit of strength. As I understand it, Phil took the first board, and pounded all five dowels in. Then he took the next board and pounded the five dowels through that second board. The incredible amount of friction meant that this part of the project went very slowly, but he had twelve of fourteen boards pounded by the time the sun went down on Tuesday.

Wednesday, he pounded the final two boards on. (He confessed that only one of the five dowels actually went all the way through correctly. The holes for one dowel were off a bit on the last two boards, so those are not really supported by the dowel. And, despite using his incredible farmer muscles, a few dowels simply refused to budge toward the end, so Phil plugged those from the other end. (If he hadn't told me, I would never have known. But he did use a few screws for added support for those last boards.)

Then came the lengthy process of planing the boards, to even them all out. He had a little handheld planer, and, by the end, felt like he had learned a good bit in how to use it: certainly not an everyday skill. Jadon, too, took a turn at it.

I admired the beautiful, almost paper-thin shavings that they generated.

When planed enough, Phil sanded it, too.

He was pleased with his accomplishment at the end of the day.

(I was pleased that we could both lift it. It's heavy, but we managed to pick it up a few inches in a test run. I think we'll be able to forego the tractor for transport.)

In other news, though the day turned wonderfully warm, when I went to pick basil for our dinner, I noticed that this last week has been unkind to the basil. The light frost has browned some leaves, though my intrepid bees continue to forage for food among the basil blossoms.

(Since I started the mite treatment last Friday, the bees have not finished even a quart of sugar water. They are close to their hibernating winter state.)

Isaiah found a book with interesting facts about insects. He read that termites can make towers up to thirty feet high. So he went to Phil's shop, found a drill and some other things (?), and created a termite block. That's certainly not anything I would have imagined.

And finally, something to make you go, "Hmm." Have you ever paid much attention to what insects will eat? When we have a cup of kombucha sitting out, we have fruit flies (and regular flies) dive bomb into it. Some mornings I find that last half inch of drink covered with drowned insects.

And, on occasion, a son will drop a raisin or two in the house. I keep expecting to see an army of ants carry the whole thing away. There is sometimes a little string of them from the door to the raisin.

So I found it shocking that I left out a cup of pasteurized apple juice (bought for a specific cleanse—not something we usually drink), and after almost a week, no bug went near it.

Now I realize that we have a different digestive system than worms and, presumably, flies and ants. I'm not entirely on board with the argument that an apple is really good because a worm is eating it. (I mean, aren't bugs on some level nature's cleanup crew? They eat the things we aren't supposed to?)

On the other hand, if there is so little life in pasteurized juice that no bug goes near it, should be really be drinking it ourselves?

Hmm.